No more corporal punishment

I am in full agreement with the minister of education, that corporal punishment is a thing of the past, an old relic of the colonial past, and we should find other ways to correct our children. We seem to put the emphasis on punishment rather than correction. Since none of us is perfect, neither Obama nor Portia Simpson Miller included, we all are prone to making mistakes, and school is a place of learning, not the department of corrections, where I understand beatings and floggings are against the law.

Since beatings and floggings are a sad reminder of our past experience with slavery, why then would we want to keep doing this? I live in North America now, and it is unacceptable here and not tolerated. I remember growing up in Jamaica, and seeing students being caned in high school, with quarter-inch canes, like cattle. Come on, whose sado-masochistic idea was this anyway?

Who gave our young girls dolls, and our young boys toy guns to play with instead of building blocks and sewing equipment? The idea is not to look back and call out the mistakes we made, and it should not be so for our kids either. 'Spare the rod and spoil the child' is an old adage of foolishness, just like the idea of guns and dolls. It's time to move forward, Jamaica. Wake up, the honourable minister is right. Yeah, mon!